After the death of State Senator Johnny Turner last October 11 write in candidates ran for his 29th District seat.

Pineville Mayor Scott Maiden.

One maiden has been in politics most of his life.

He was elected as the state's youngest mayor in the 1987 before running and being elected a second time in 2015.

Kentucky Edition caught up with the new state senator to talk about his unconventional election.

I've been around politics a lot.

My father, Ben Meyer, my grandfather Meyer.

So I was I guess it was kind of in my blood, my dreams.

So I've kind of had a little taste of it.

I've become much more patient as a as an older Meyer than I was when I was young.

Times have have got tough when the coal mining got tough and the coastal drivers cut, money got cut back and our community lost businesses and things of that.

But we've adjusted and we've learned to to be sufficient with with fewer people.

And it seems like this time around that I think I had a better handle on things as as that was older and this time around I'd known Johnny for a long time and I tell the story, you know, Johnny was always proud to tell that he was from Bill Penny here in the little community called Redbird British, a little mission school up there.

And my dad always called Johnny.

Johnny Redburn.

Johnny was very proud that he grabbed, you know what school at Redbird Missionary School.

So Johnny was well in tune with everything that was was moving our district forward.

Go ahead, Congressman Rogers and Senator Stivers and the caucus supported me, and those were all great endorsements, don't get me wrong.

But, you know, I'll say this.

I probably wouldn't have got in the race if I had not known I had that 411 day race.

But when I got the family endorsement, I may not know how many people came up to me and said, I don't really know you, but, you know, it's a family.

Thank you.

Who should be?

And, you know, that says a lot about to me, it's about Johnny's character that people trusted him and they trusted his family to, you know, to to just go out for their word or their letter that they put out for me endorsing me in that race.

It was so humbling.

But it was also very emotional, too.

I mean, to to think, you know, out of the 11 people in the race, they chose me.

It was so odd for me because I had never done a write in, you know, for anybody.

You know.

So not only were we asking people to vote, we were doing education, saying, hey, you know, you've got to fill in square, you've got to wrap my name in correctly.

I'm certainly about any lowering any taxes that we can lower and making things more cost effective for, you know, our people because, you know, it's been tough.

We've had some tough times here lately.

And one of the I guess one of the things that I'm talking about that I want to tackle is this car tax.

I know it's been tried and I know they talk about it, but one of the things I want to look at it for or the way I want to look at it is trying to do it on a phase out, maybe a seven year, ten year phase out anything that that's positive for school systems.

I'm I'm a public school now.

I'd love to see her teachers have some more money.

I'd like to see you know, schools continue to get more funding.

I feel like, you know, my past ten years in power have been successful and I just want to maybe take it to another level and see if I can bring the the other counties into everything that, you know, all together.

And hopefully we can have a great area to for tourism in general.

Men says one of his first priorities in office is to pass legislation naming a road in honor of the late Senator Turner.